Research

DuckDuckGo is a search engine that prioritizes user privacy. It does not store user data and is free to use as a browser extension or mobile app. DuckDuckGo currently processes over 60 million search queries a day. In comparison, Google processes over 3.5 billion search queries a day. As of June 2020, DuckDuckGo had a share of approximately 1.5% in the market for search engines. This summary describes how DuckDuckGo works, its business model, competitors, and implications for innovation and competition policy.

Big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have amassed an unprecedented collection of individual data. The authors demonstrate why data ownership is insufficient to give consumers control over their data and how individual data is actually social data due to data externalities. The paper explores the effects of collecting individual data, terms of trade between consumers and digital platforms, the social dimension of data, and how data intermediaries change the level of aggregation and precision of information they provide. The authors find that the revenue-maximizing data policy is to collect consumer data but not forward it to producers.

Firms are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to analyze marketplace trends and determine pricing strategies. This paper demonstrates how AI pricing algorithms may actually learn, with no human instruction, to set anti-competitive prices under standard economic conditions. The authors’ findings highlight the need for antitrust reform that recognizes the potential for algorithms to autonomously collude.

How does integration between a dominant search engine and a publisher affect a search engine’s incentives to bias towards its own content? In addition, how does integration affect the quantity of ads on an integrated publisher’s site? In this paper, the authors develop a theoretical model to demonstrate the effects of no integration, partial integration, and full integration on search engine bias and quantity of publisher ads. The model also sheds lights on user and advertiser welfare after integration.

A revolutionary approach to data ownership and privacy, Solid is a tech stack developed by the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. Solid’s mission is to decentralize the web by doing away with huge data silos, providing users ownership over their personal data, and reshaping the nature of competition among digital companies.

This paper explores the relationship between two ubiquitous phenomena in the digital economy: online ad auctions and tracking cookies. The authors assess what happens to ad auction revenue when competing advertisers receive different kinds of information from their cookies. They find that the revenue to ad sellers like Google and Facebook changes dramatically based on ad auction structure and on the quantity and quality of information available to advertisers.